Five random songs: 7/30/12

Following up on an earlier post, here are five more random tunes from my music collection. Was my former student correct? Can we really tell a lot about someone just by their CD wallet or their MP3 player? I’m not sure, but it makes for some interesting conversations and great new music.

Feel like joining in on the fun? Choose five random songs from your library (here’s a random number generator, if you’re so inclined) and publish your own random songs playlist. If you do, I hope you’ll leave a link in the Comments section. Continue reading

Every place is sacred

Oak, hickory, dogwood, mountain laurel, sassafras, tulip poplar, elm, sweet gum, locust—I wished I’d brought along my tree book. Frothy green ferns carpeted the ground, but not so thickly that I couldn’t see the dark, glossy poison ivy leaning into the trail. Leaves of three, stay away from me.

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Emergency instructions: A matter of life and death

Concise, easy-to-understand instructions can mean the difference between success and failure—or even between life and death. In emergency situations, for instance, our reasoning abilities diminish. We just want to get out alive. Our brains are in crisis mode, not think-and-reflect mode.

When we create text to accompany life-saving equipment, it’s important that even terrified or badly injured people can understand it in a millisecond. How we phrase these brief instructions can determine whether our readers live or die.

Here’s a great example courtesy of my sister, who was traveling for work when she snapped these photos. Continue reading

The Little Peach Tree That Could

 

I like trees because they seem to be more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
—Willa Cather

My great-grandfather, whom everyone called Pap, planted this dwarf peach tree in 1942. This was right before his son Charlie Will (my grandfather) had to pass up a second-round draft notice from the New York Giants and accept a first-round draft notice from the U.S. Army.

By the late 1950s, Continue reading